As an example for exemplifying the present invention, it is referred hereinafter to mobile data transmission and data services, which are constantly making progress. With the increasing penetration of such services, a need for increased bandwidth for conveying the data is emerging. Likewise, with an increased usage of mobile handheld devices, it is important that power consumption for those devices is minimized as they are operating on battery power which is rather limited and otherwise would need to be recharged frequently. Frequent recharging, however, represents a discomfort for the user and may also contribute to reduce the lifetime of the battery used. Power consumption is thus referred hereinafter as the physical quantity to be emulated in such system or a part thereof, such as analog transmitters.
Power estimation is thus a fundamental milestone in the design of hardware platforms such as transmitters, but also of any other hardware, because it enables power consumption optimization from the early stages of the hardware platform design. A power estimation paradigm called power emulation was introduced with the capabilities of estimating power with accuracies of less than 20% during the design phase of hardware platforms.
Currently available power emulation methodologies are, however, only compatible with digital hardware and/or designs. Thus, those emulation methods and devices can not unequivocally be applied for estimating the power consumption of at least partly analog devices such as a full transmission chain including a modulator/demodulator (hereinafter in short modem) (of e.g. a wireless handset device), which also include to a considerable extent analog devices.
The power consumption of such a modem is, however, a key performance factor for the entire device. The radio frequency (RF) transmitter is making a very significant contribution to the modem's overall power consumption. Measuring this contribution in a real life scenario is very challenging as it requires advanced test equipment and advanced analysis work (in order to isolate this specific contribution). Furthermore, this measurement can only be done very late in the modem development as it requires mature complete hardware, HW.
A currently available power emulation methodology is based on a power model as shown in FIG. 1 which was introduced for the power emulation of digital designs from the register transfer level, RTL, of abstraction by J. Coburn, S. Ravi, and A. Raghunathan, in an article “Power emulation: a new paradigm for power estimation”, in Design Automation Conference, 2005. Proceedings. 42nd, pages 700-705, 2005.
As shown in FIG. 1, that power model takes the values of the inputs/outputs of an RTL component as inputs and utilizes a respective flip-flop per input line in1 to inN to save a previous value. At a given clocking supplied via the signal line “POW STROBE”, a current and the previous value of each input line, in1 to inN, (in FIG. 1) are evaluated to detect a binary transition by subjecting them to the XOR operation, and the result is AND gated with a power coefficient associated to the respective transition (in1, . . . , inN) to yield the corresponding power consumption. The coefficient may depend on the transistor size or technology used, or the like. Thereafter, the individual powers are summed in power summation and output to a further buffering flip-flop and then finally output.
It is, however, apparent that analog signals can not be evaluated in terms of a binary transition. Hence, given the continuous nature of the analog signals, the above power emulation model can not be used for power emulation of analog devices and/or at least partly analog devices such as RF transmitters.
Thus, there is still a need for further improvement in terms of proper power emulation for at least partly analog devices.